Cross the Line

by James Patterson

  “It’s insane,” Hobbes said, arms crossed.

  Fender said, “We’ll be either shot or hanged.”

  “You knew from the get-go what this was,” Brown said coldly. “Wasn’t it you, Hobbes, who said people would have to clean house to make way for the revolution in this country?”

  “I did, but—”

  “But nothing. You’re in this to clean house and see the revolution sparked or you’re not in this at all. Fender, you also agreed with that strategy. Or am I wrong?”

  Hobbes squirmed in his chair, said nothing. Fender glared at Brown.

  Brown was about to ask the room for a vote when Cass said, “Shit.”

  He looked over at her, saw her staring at the muted TV tuned to CNN. Special Agent Ned Mahoney was walking toward a bank of microphones with the big FBI emblem on the wall behind them. Low on the screen, the banner read FBI Raids Sex Club Believed Linked to Vigilante Killings.

  “Turn that up,” Brown said sharply.

  Cass grabbed the remote and punched off the mute. They heard Mahoney say, “I’ll get to the Phoenix Club in Vienna, Virginia, but first we’d like to release two photographs of people we believe are part of the vigilante group.”

  The screen split in two, and images appeared of Hobbes and Cass without their hoods inside the late Antonin Guryev’s house on Mobjack Bay.

  “Mother of God, we’re screwed,” Fender said, seething.

  Hobbes and Cass had both gone pale and stony.

  The screen returned to Special Agent Mahoney, who said, “As of now, the woman’s name is unknown. But the man is Lester Hobbes, a mercenary and an assassin. We are asking anyone who has any information on Hobbes or this woman to come forward and help us locate them.”

  “How do you know Hobbes and the woman are part of the vigilantes?” a reporter shouted.

  Mahoney said, “Elena Guryev used her iPhone to video the feeds of several security cameras in her house during the attack.”

  That set off a frenzy among the reporters, all of them asking where Mrs. Guryev was.

  The FBI agent turned stoic and reserved. “Gunmen broke into an FBI safe house this morning and killed four of my best men. They also severely wounded a DEA agent and shot Mrs. Guryev to death, leaving her deaf son an orphan. And, yes, we believe the gunmen were associated with the vigilantes, or the Regulators, as they evidently call themselves. Turning to the raid in Virginia—”

  Fender grabbed the remote, punched mute. “Regulators?” he said, looking around the room. “How did they know that? Who used—”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Hobbes said, looking at Cass. “We’re done.”

  “The both of you did us all in,” Fender said, getting to his feet and looking like he wanted to smash things. “Taking off your hoods. Breaking the rules of engagement. What the hell’s with that?”

  The room around Brown erupted with accusations and demands.

  Brown stood up and roared, “Enough!”

  The fifteen Regulators shut up, all of them red-faced and panting.

  “It’s done,” Brown said sharply. “They’re coming after us. You knew they would eventually. So it’s done. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to turn on each other? Are you going to run? Or are you going to fight back, show some spine, believe in a better tomorrow created by your sacrifices and mine?”

  He let that sink in for a while and then said, “Show of hands. Who’s with me?”

  After several moments, hands began to go up, thirteen of them, including Cass’s. Fender remained livid but eventually raised his hand. Finally, Hobbes did too.

  The television screen had switched from the FBI press conference to the weather forecast.

  Brown grabbed the remote, turned the sound back on, and watched the forecast. The National Weather Service was calling for gale-force winds overnight.

  “There, some good news for once,” Brown said. “Couldn’t be better. Get your gear strapped down, and your heads screwed on straight. We go at twenty-one hundred hours.”

  Chapter

  88

  Nana Mama was cooking pancakes for Ali the next morning when I came downstairs.

  “Pancakes?” I said, rubbing Ali’s head. “What did you do right this time?”

  “He put that letter to Dr. deGrasse Tyson in an envelope,” my grandmother said, gesturing at a stamped, addressed envelope on the counter. “In my book, seeing things through is cause for pancakes and real maple syrup.”

  Ali grinned as she set a plate before him. “You think he’ll answer me?”

  “You never know until you try,” I said. “Where’s Bree?”

  “Up and long gone,” Nana Mama said. “She’s got a pile of paperwork to plow through and wanted to get at it. You hungry?”

  “Tempting, but I think I’ll skip the—”

  “Hey, Dad, look!” Ali cried, pointing to the little TV on the counter.

  I glanced over and saw the bizarre image of a bearded driver in an Amish buggy looking up at a low-flying, pale white blimp that was dragging a thick steel cable more than a mile long across fields and through trees.

  The newscaster said that sometime during the night the blimp had broken free of its mooring at the U.S. Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where the military tested everything from cannon rounds to chemical weapons. The blimp was part of a top secret over-the-horizon surveillance system currently being evaluated. The army believed the blimp’s cable had snapped due to gale-force winds that had struck coastal Maryland overnight.

  “I’ve seen that thing,” I said. “The blimp. A couple of times last week from the Eastern Shore.”

  The newscaster said the heavy cable had already damaged multiple high-tension lines and several homes and buildings. The army had crews trailing the blimp and trying to figure out how to bring it down safely.

  “Runaway blimp,” Nana Mama said, shaking her head.

  “You don’t hear that every day,” I said, pouring myself some coffee.

  Before I could take a sip, my phone buzzed, alerting me to a text, and then another, and then a third. Annoyed, I set the coffee down and dug the phone from my pocket.

  Call me.

  Kerry Rutledge.

  Urgent.

  A fourth text came in. A phone number.

  I took my coffee, went out into the great room, and called the young woman who’d survived the road-rage attack.

  “Dr. Cross?” she said.

  “Right here, Kerry,” I said. “What’s so urgent?”

  “You told me to call if I remembered anything more. I did. I mean, I do.”

  She sounded breathless, almost panicked.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s calm down a little, and then you’ll tell me what’s going on. Where are you?”

  “At a rehab center in…I can’t remember that,” Kerry said, and she took a deep breath. “But I do remember now that the motorcycle was a dark Honda, big, with a windshield and, like, a lit-up dashboard, you know?”

  “How do you know it was a Honda?”

  “It was on the gas tank. I could see it in the light from the dashboard.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes, but it’s probably nothing.”

  “Let me be the judge of that,” I said.

  Kerry said, “There was something on the windshield, a decal, on the lower right-hand corner. It was square and I keep thinking that there was an anchor and a rope on it.”

  “An anchor and a rope on a decal?” I said. And then a memory was triggered, and my heart began to pound a little faster. “A decal like a parking sticker?”

  Chapter

  89

  Bree sat at her desk drinking her second cup of coffee and reading over reports of complaints against one of her detectives. She tried to pay close attention to the details of the report and to the detective’s response, looking for differences and similarities. She hated second-guessing a cop who’d been acting in the heat of the moment, but if she was going to do t
he job right, she had to study the situation before rendering judgment.

  For the most part, she stayed on task. But then her attention wandered and flickered over to what Katya Kravic had told her about Edita and McGrath. Had Tommy pushed her too far? Had Stavros or Bogrov shot them both and then—what, planted the gun at Terry Howard’s? Made his death look like a suicide?

  Those unanswered questions only raised more unanswered questions, so she took a deep breath, told herself to compartmentalize, and tried to refocus on the disciplinary report.

  A knock came at her doorjamb. She sighed and looked up. Kurt Muller was standing there with that goofy grin on his face again.

  “I gather the date with Ms. Noble the other night went well?” Bree asked, sitting back in her chair.

  “Better than well,” Muller said. “I’m smitten.”

  Bree laughed. “I could see that the moment you met her. Is she smitten?”

  “I get that feeling,” he said, the grin growing.

  “Good for you. Now get back to work so I can get back to work.”

  Muller sobered, said, “I actually wanted to tell you we may or may not have caught a break.”

  Muller said he’d been checking on the status of Tommy McGrath’s life insurance policy every few days since his death, and the beneficiary had not come forward to make a claim. When he’d called that morning, however, he found that an adjuster with the insurance company’s claims department had learned of the chief of detectives’ murder and tried to contact the beneficiary but had been directed to the beneficiary’s attorney.

  “So the beneficiary did not initiate contact?” Bree said, disappointed.

  “Life ain’t neat,” Muller said, flipping through a reporter’s notebook. “The attorney’s name is…Lance Gordon…practices in McLean. The insurance adjuster said Gordon consulted with his client, who declined to make a claim at first. Then, three hours later, Gordon called back and filed the claim, saying his client was going to donate the money to a charity.”

  “This muddies everything, doesn’t it?” Bree said, turning to her computer and doing an Internet search on Lance Gordon.

  She found his law firm, looked at the partners’ page on the website, and clicked on Gordon. A picture popped up of a handsome man in his late forties, very long and lean and dressed in a well-tailored suit.

  There was something about Gordon’s face that was familiar, but Bree couldn’t place him at first. Then she did, in another time and location, seeing herself turn after Gordon and sniff. He’d smelled like something, hadn’t he? What was it?

  “Chief?”

  Bree startled, looked at Muller.

  “I was asking how you wanted to handle this.”

  “Give me a second,” she said, making a possible connection in her head. She yanked open a desk drawer and rummaged around until she found what she was looking for: a small brown bottle with a yellow label. She opened the bottle and sniffed.

  Bree saw Gordon again in her mind, clearer now. She sniffed again, and all sorts of distorted puzzle pieces shifted and came together.

  Bree smiled at Muller and said, “Shut the door, Detective. We’ve got work to do.”

  Chapter

  90

  Colonel Jeb Whitaker’s Honda Blackbird was in the same U.S. Naval Academy parking lot as before when Sampson and I checked around two that afternoon. Sampson walked past the powerful motorcycle, pretended to admire the bike, and planted a GPS tracking device under its rear fender.

  We knew a whole lot more about Whitaker now, and, like Tommy McGrath had felt about the Phoenix Club, the more we learned, the more we wanted to know.

  Colonel Whitaker had a stellar record, first off. He’d graduated from the Naval Academy in the upper quarter of his class and later won the U.S. Navy Cross for valor, risking his life repeatedly to bring wounded Marines off the streets of war-torn Fallujah. Then shrapnel from an IED nearly cut off his leg, ending his tour of duty.

  The colonel had subsequently earned a doctorate from the War College and then joined the faculty of the Naval Academy, where he taught strategy and amphibious warfare. He was known as a charismatic teacher and was rated highly by students on several faculty-review sites we found on the web.

  On paper, Whitaker did not seem like someone we should have been looking at. But then we found out his wife had died three years before in a car accident, hit head-on by a drunken, high twenty-two-year-old who had been not only speeding but texting.

  Whitaker’s Honda Blackbird turned out to be the fastest production motorcycle available on the planet, capable of blowing the doors off a Maserati. And Whitaker knew how to drive it. He’d raced motorcycles earlier in his life.

  Sampson and I had debated bringing the colonel in for questioning but decided in the end to hang back, follow him, and learn more before we got in his face. Whitaker helped us out by appearing forty minutes after we’d set up surveillance on the Blackbird. He limped to the motorcycle, put on his helmet, and set off.

  We trailed Whitaker a mile back, watching his progress on an iPad connected via satellite to the GPS transmitter. We thought the colonel might go north to his home on Chesapeake Bay, but instead he headed west and drove to the George Washington University Medical Center in DC.

  He parked in the visitors’ lot, and we drove into it just in time to see Whitaker walking toward the hospital. I jumped out and trotted after him.

  Because of the limp, the colonel wasn’t hard to keep up with. But once we got inside the hospital, I had to hang back, and I lost Whitaker when he got an elevator. Before the doors closed, though, I heard him tell someone he was going to the ICU.

  I waited a few moments. My cell beeped, alerting me to an e-mail from Judith Noble, the FBI gun tech. Subject: Remington .45.

  I pressed the elevator call button, opened the e-mail, and read it. Then I read it again, trying to get my head around her conclusions. Sonofabitch, I thought. How was that possible?

  The elevator dinged and the doors opened. I rode the elevator up to the ICU, thinking of all of the ramifications of the e-mail I’d just read.

  Part of me wanted to back off, let Mahoney know, and stand aside, let the Feds do their job. Instead, I went to the nurses’ station, showed a nurse my badge, and asked if a Marine officer with a limp had come in. She said he was down the hall, third door on the right.

  “Whose room is that?”

  “That would be Mr. Potter’s,” she said. “George Potter.”

  I squinted, said, “The wounded DEA agent?”

  “That’s the one,” she said.

  “George and I have worked together quite a bit lately. Think I’ll pay him a visit, see how he’s doing.”

  Chapter

  91

  Sometimes it pays to hang back. Other times it pays to rattle a few chains.

  I didn’t knock, just stepped quietly into Potter’s room. Colonel Whitaker sat at the DEA special agent’s bedside. The patient looked waxy and sallow, but alert. The two of them were deep in a heated conversation when Potter spotted me.

  He tensed, said, “Alex?”

  “Came by to see how you were doing, George,” I said, ignoring his reaction. “Last time I saw you, you were hurting pretty bad.”

  “I’m still hurting pretty bad,” Potter grumbled as he shifted in bed. “Do you know my old friend Jeb?”

  I looked at the colonel and acted like I recognized him from somewhere but couldn’t place him.

  “We met once, Dr. Cross,” Whitaker said, getting up from his chair. “In a parking lot at the Naval Academy.”

  I snapped my fingers, pointed at him, and said, “That’s it. Colonel…”

  “Whitaker. Jeb Whitaker.”

  “Small world,” I said. “You knowing George and all.”

  “Colonel Whitaker was my commander in Iraq,” Potter said. “Best damned combat officer I’ve ever seen.”

  Whitaker made a dismissive flip of his hand. “That’s the painkillers talking. George was the b
rave one, taking a bullet like that.”

  “For all the good it did Elena Guryev,” the DEA agent said, crestfallen.

  I said nothing, just looked at Potter and then at Colonel Whitaker.

  Potter licked his lips and asked, “You found anything new?”

  I thought about that and then said, “When that sniper, Condon, was killed? We found a forty-five-caliber Remington in his motorcycle saddlebag. We got a report back this morning that links the Remington to a series of road-rage killings.”

  Whitaker was a cool character, battle hardened. He took the information in stride, even appeared uninterested.

  Potter, though, suddenly looked lost in thought.

  “Well,” I said, making a show of checking my watch. “I’ve got other appointments, but I wanted to see how you were doing, George.”

  Potter broke from his thoughts, smiled weakly, and said, “I don’t think I’ll be running any marathons anytime soon. Thanks for stopping by, Alex.”

  “Get better, and we look forward to seeing you back at work,” I said. “Colonel Whitaker? Until fate brings us together again.”

  “Until then,” Whitaker said.

  I showed them nothing but an expression of goodwill, shook their hands, and left.

  Outside, I waited for Sampson to bring the car around and gazed up at the hospital, thinking how much I’d like to be a fly on the wall up there in the ICU.

  Chapter

  92

  Jeb Whitaker’s thoughts became a blur after Alex Cross left the room. The master strategist’s brain sped through three different plans of response in the few seconds before Cross’s footsteps faded and George Potter spoke.

  “Quite the coincidence,” Potter said.